I liked the part about Chime calling you at the scheduled start of meeting. So simple yet I had never thought of this since my org uses WebEx.
With a smart phone that would pretty well via a push notification or an actual call, but not sure how that would work when you want a join a meeting from a physical meeting room with its own AV system. I'm sure there is a way to get that set up.
I wonder how Chime callback will work with back-back meetings.
ie, I'm in someone's Chime/webex, and I need to join a different one. Also does it seamlessly join multiple connections - one benefit of Webex is that I can start my meeting on the iPhone while leaving a meeting room so that others can hop on, and then have my laptop join later so I can share my screen when I hit my desk.
It can/should tell everyone at the start and tell you specifically when it's time to say bye. Depending on the time of the next meeting you could opt to join that one late... obviously triple booked will never work.
our neighbor's mother in law makes 64 per hour on the internet. she has been out of work for ten months. last month her pay-check was 13214 just working on the internet 5 hours a day... check this site... http://tinyurl.com/lidfk88kl
Seemed like it was just a mobile join notification in the video similar to Skype for business or WebEx if you are using VoIP. No?
My company used WebEx and I could make it dial me and start up my conference line without having to go through all the regular pin entry stuff. Now we're using Lync (Skype for business) which is similar although tragically buggy. That can also dial me and sends notifications if you hook it up.
The key for these kind of apps is cost and reliability. Seems like they're advertising substantial cost reductions and better quality. If either one is true they'll likely make out really well.
I must say I've been really disappointed with how often it crashes outright or has major rendering issues during screen sharing. When it works it's really convenient but 20% of meetings with screen share involved seem to have an issue. I really think quality is life or death for these products. If my company weren't a tight Microsoft partner I really doubt we'd be using it.
WebEx wasn't as convenient but at least it worked correctly the vast majority of the time.
Anecdotal, but I use Skype for Business every day without any bugs/issues, as does the rest of my company (~50 people, lots of remote workers + liberal WFH policy).
When there's a rare issue, its usually a headset not working, which is probably more a user or windows problem.
I don't see a lot of audio issues, but tons of problems with screen sharing and video.
My company has about 4000 users in 100+ countries so maybe it's bandwidth/scale in part. i see a lot of stuff like skypefb crashes or doesn't render correctly when you try to screen share, etc especially internationally.
Not 100% certain part of it isn't due to us cheaping out on infrastructure to run it.
> not sure how that would work when you want a join a meeting from a physical meeting room with its own AV system. I'm sure there is a way to get that set up.
As someone who works in video conferencing, this is often very broken. The are all kinds of compatibility issues and crappy UX. One of our core selling points is getting room systems into online meetings.
This is one of my favorite features. Using computer audio is awful especially on the go and GotoMeeting fails to recognize correctly the code I enter some 20% of the time it seems.
If there is anybody who happens to read this who is responsible for implementing the code that reads the meeting codes, please implement the following changes:
1. Make it so meeting codes are strictly forbidden from having repeating digits, by construction.
2. Make it so that when entering meeting codes, if you think you see repeated digits, consider it just one instance of that digit.
The cell system does not use literal DMTF tones to dial calls; those are played by the phone itself for the user's benefit. If the cell system used DMTF for numeric signalling, we'd all be dialing a lot more wrong numbers. (And we'd all groan when we got a new line with a number with repeated digits in it....) Heck, even on VOIP systems very well connected to the internet, I've had trouble entering 9-12 digit codes without the remote system becoming convinced I'd actually entered a 11-15 digit code. I've gotten a few strange looks before for the way I push the buttons for the codes as rapidly as possible, because, ironically, the human intuition here is exactly backwards; you intuitively think that if the remote system isn't understanding your numbers you should press the number "longer" and harder, but that actually increases the chances of the system hearing multiple instances of that number. You actually want to pound the number buttons as quickly as possible. You still can't deal with the entire number being dropped, but it's still your best chance sometimes.
....
'course, there's probably some patent out that this is in violation of. In which case you are authorized and even encouraged to use this post as part of a defense that this technique is Obvious to One Skilled in the Art. I'm not a telecom engineer.
Absolutely aggreed with this. We still have to pay a 5 to 10% task to get the conference call going.
Chime is the absolute good step in the right direction, however we will need need a layer on top to solve for all conference call systems.
There are three pieces that needs to be figured out to make this work well:
1. How do you deal with (non?) presence? Are you joining from the AV hardware?
2. How do you deal with PSTN?
3. How do you deal with other VoIP solutions out there.
"Meetings call you" is a good idea, as is the reconnecting stuff. Who knows if anyone will use this, but even with all the supply in this market, there is still space for something that actually works well. As someone who works remotely I can't wait until this gets figured out.
I don't believe so. If you look under the FAQs and the "Security and Control" heading of the Features page, there is no mention of encryption beyond AES-256. Companies offering E2E typically like to highlight that somewhere, even in a non-technical way.
Furthermore, the security is apparently "fully managed", which to me translates to "keys securely stored on our servers, not client-side."
Speaking of.. can Slack hurry up and buy Zoom? Aren't they pretty flush with cash? It seems crazy that they are letting this huge market (where they have a foothold) slip away to new competitors.
I'm not sure I see the utility in this, as Amazon resources and group chat don't really have a lot of overlap, at least for me. What would you need "integrated" into the new AWS Chat that couldn't be accomplished with a chatbot and Slack?
"With Amazon Chime, you can feel confident you’re communicating securely."
This wording has always struck me as being awful. People felt confident investing with Bernie Madoff as well. I'd rather have confidence from proven security instead of just feeling confident.
I'd word it something along the lines of: "Communicate securely with your team, confident that we've taken care of your online security via [list of reasons]". Yes, confidence is a feeling but for me it sounds better this way. Saying "you can feel confident" reads to me like "with MtGox, your funds can be secure".
They tout security but I don't think it's open source and it looks like everything is stored on Amazon servers.
Minimally it is centralized, and you can't verify that there's no backdoor. In this day and age, that means we're both trusting their core intentions, and also trusting that some government won't step in and silently force their hand. I don't personally feel that is good enough to be considered secure anymore.
That is exactly what I thought when I read the words "secure" and "trust". If it is not open source it is neither secure nor should anybody trust it. The word used in Britain to describe a statement like that is bollocks.
I'm really curious how this all-in-one concept will compare to the Slack approach of chat as the central functionality augmented by a bunch of integrations with external services.
Enterprise conferencing software is so bad and so expensive I'm astonished it took this long for a decent competitor to come in. I'm really surprised Google didn't go all in with making Hangouts a decent competitor. I have a feeling this will make a lot of money.
Hangouts is so strange to me (like many Google products I guess). They got a ton of traction; first release immediately was super solid and then nothing. Nothing has changed in ages. No obvious features get implemented. I would love so much to have s tile view of all participants. Ideally we would get a codec that's actually supported by hardware instead of this battery draining mess. I'd love to have an option for the video not to be cropped. I can't count the confusion that has caused over the years with people in meeting wondering why someone is only showing their forehead out why everybody but them can see multiple people on camera but they only see someone in the center. All the hard work seems to be done, but Google refuses to polish and properly maintain it. It's bizarre.
At one time this was a function of how Google did promotions/pay raises. I'm not sure if Hangouts got caught in that catch 22 or not but it did kill a lot of decent projects.
Had that team remained relevant they could have conceivably done a "Chromebox" Hub like the Surface Hub and given Microsoft some competition in that space.
EDIT: Ok so as is pointed out there is a chromebox for meetings. Pretty nice. Seems to be out of the Enterprise group though, is that still part of Google or is it an 'Other Bet' now?
We had it at my old company and it was garbage. Super frustrating to join meetings (type your automatically generated, super long meeting name on a tiny keyboard), random crashes freezes and relatively poor video quality. Another super annoying thing was screensharing had an extremely low bitrate. It was so bad that it was pretty pretty useless to demo any nice UI features or animations. The framerate was 2-5 fps.
Completely opposite experience. Where Skype and Gotomeeting would lag, Hangouts was 99% smooth. Perhaps you've got terrible firewall?
The only problem I used to have is audio would die whenever I mess with browser plugins (disabling that WebRTC feature that leaks your internal IP for privacy, and some other Googlyeish feature).
We use Hangouts pretty extensively (2300 employees) but for anything involving more than 4 people we've switched to Zoom; all of the OP's problems creep up quickly and intermittently in Hangouts.
Also we keep WebEx around for screen control, it seems still best bang/buck for that.
we use it at work. it hooks into meeting rooms' calendars and you just have to use the chromebox remote to select the right hangout in the agenda. no typing involved (unless you were doing an ad-hoc meeting, then you'd just type one of our names as the hangout name). It works quite well.
Yeah we have the same experience, I'm surprised hangouts works so badly for others. As long as you invite the chromeboxes to the same meetings as everyone else, it's super simple to operate and for everyone to join.
Google desperately needs an "Executive Vice President of People Actually Using Shit". Someone who's entire job is to go to demos of products that are about to ship and cancel them until they at least work well enough to pass the laugh test.
Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone can do) because Google Home is there, so that Google Home can tell you that Google Home can't add calendar entries yet.
Hey, here's Allo. We think you're going to love it. I mean, it doesn't have SMS support, so no one is actually going to use it, but other than being pointless, ain't it great?
My EVP there would have walked in, saw the first slide about a new messenger, and said, "Let me stop you here. Does it transparently bridge IP chat and SMS into one conversation like iMessage? No? OK, I'm going to lunch. I'm sure your stickers are cool and all, but pass."
Why all the hate for Hangouts? I have used it for five years to build and run my company. There is never an issue with Hangouts unless someone in the meeting has a hardware problem (meanwhile everyone else can handle the meeting). It's fast and easy for anyone to use screenshots or video. If you use YouTube Live Events, you can even have a company meeting with every person joining. We have done these once a week for years for fifteen minutes prior to lunch.
Hangouts was (is?) pretty good. But it hasn't been immune to Google's inability to figure out how to make a thing people want.
Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video.
I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do.
And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.
Most everything you're describing is a part of the new beta hangouts.
If you're a part of a large Google Cloud account, have your IT person contact your gCloud account manager and get on the beta. Actually, if you're a part of a large account and your IT team is risk tolerant.
Yes, agreed. It is great — use it where I work (10k employees) and it was such a relief over all the conferencing solutions we tried (my team was a guinea pig for several).
The coolest thing is that the company rolled out hangouts in a weekend to 100% of the conference rooms, replacing all projectors in the process. It completely democratized remote work and remote offices since people are using Hangout by default.
You're right in that 99% of them are complete garbage. However I was pleasantly surprised when my company switched to Zoom[1]. A company I had never heard of before. In terms of call quality I've never experienced anything better. Beyond that their mobile experience is almost better in terms of raw features than their desktop app (which is still very good in its own right).
We're across 24 hours of time zones and conduct a majority of internal and external meetings over video conference. We've pretty much tried them all and Zoom has been the best.
That said, there are still things to improve, so will be interesting to compare.
I'm based in the EU (until Brexit anyway) and often do calls with mainland Europe. Never had that problem. Seen a high CPU warning a couple of times but it goes away. Overall I'm a fan. I have friends who use it for virtual conferences even.
I use the free version out of the box to onboard new people (mostly independent coaches/consultants from around the world) as partners - see https://www.agendashift.com/partners to get a feel of geographic coverage
I guess like every option mentioned here they all suck for someone. We have used Uberconference and the audio quality is terrible. And it's not uniformly terrible either which is even more frustrating. Some of the attendees won't be able to understand some people and other attendees everything sounds fine (although it always sounds like a poor quality cellphone conversation).
With Google Hangouts we have poor quality audio as well and at least once per day we have someone that their audio won't come thorough unless they restart their Mac.
I've used Uberconference (pro) over fiber for a couple of years, and it's been rock solid. In cases where one caller is bad, the web interface will show you who is killing the call quality and lets you mute them.
Except in rare cases, I find the problems you're describing are usually a problem with the end-user, their equipment, or their network. Cheap phones, bad cell connection, bad voip, etc. An unmuted speakerphone with a noisy background can bring most calls to their knees.
I'm secretary for an org. We're trying to use uberconference for our executive board meetings. I like that remotes can call into conference bridge via phone.
I bought a SABRA bluetooth thingie for the room. Seems to work well.
Our results are mixed. We test out the conf room before the meeting starts. Good to go. Then weird stuff happens. People being muted. Their icon shows them talking, but no sound. People being dropped.
I don't mind the unreliability so much. 7 laws of networking and so forth.
I frikkin hate that I don't know what's broken, so can't hope to fix it. Especially DURING the frikkin meeting.
We too have used Uberconference, I forget why we ditched that as well, might have been down to the cost of the thing. I actually quite liked it, the web application was solid and it encourages ad-hoc meetings.
The plugin is dummy, required by chrome and just gives permission to share screen. Appear.in has been whitelisted on firefox and requires no plugins there.
The power drain from Hangouts/Chrome is astounding. I admit it's convienent but native does have its benefits it you need a lot of video conferencing (like all day pairing)
Adobe connect allows participants on desktop to enter in the browser without software downloads aswell (http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect/meetings.html).It's expensive though. Anyone know any more inexpensive options that work natively in the browser? Would be nice to get a little list going.
Hangouts requires a proprietary plugin in Firefox on Linux. I'll use it for work, on my work computer, but I'll never use it on my personal computers for that reason.
The answer I received when I asked about linux support for SH may be helpful here: Instead of porting screen hero, they are (were? 6 mos ago) working on integrating the features into Slack.
At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr.
But uhh, call-in rates of 1c/min/participant? That's going to add up. We would regularly have meetings of two hour duration (programming, planning) with up to six-eight attending is a $10 meeting in itself. Chicken feed compared to salaries but I could easily see pricing of up to $1k/mo with this.
Compare the 1c per minute to the staff cost of meetings and it's not even pocket change. It's like a 1% tax on meetings.
To get a $1k meeting bill with $100k fully loaded avg participant cost or about $50/hr (way too low in metros, but let's be conservative), that's 1600+ meeting hours or about $80k/mo in staff costs.
(I see you do mention this but I wanted to call it out).
I think an interesting way to look at it is, if it can make your meetings one minute shorter than what you do now, you'll actually save.
Actually, I appreciate the heads up... I wonder if we're still on "older" plans that are more expensive (I don't run the billing but I do get to listen to the complaints about the cost). Because yeah, at the current plans we should be seeing a max of $7k/yr.
I've seen almost every solution used internally at Amazon to one degree or another. It's really telling that you get a bunch of highly competent technical people in the room and they still end up fighting with the conferencing software and waste a bunch of time in the meeting trying to get everyone connected.
I'm really not surprised they built their own in the end. It's a clear pain point for companies.
That said, my current employers (not Amazon) have been using Zoom (zoom.us) and it seems to be really quite good. I've had almost no problems with it at all.
Most place I've worked, we'd waste anywhere from 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every meeting just trying to get A/V systems and voice conferencing to work.
"Anyone there? Hello? Crap, someone needs to dial in as the host. OK Is everyone dialed in? Good. Oh, wait, Roger can't hear us. Roger, dial back in. OK. Hey, whoever is at the cocktail party, can you go on mute?? Thank you. All right. Who's projecting? The projector is VGA, does anyone have a laptop with VGA? How about a dongle? Great, we can see it now. Can everyone who's remote see the screen sharing? No? OK let's restart the screen sharing program. How about now? Shit, we lost Roger again! Why is the screen 640x480? Damnit, can we just use a different laptop? E-mail the presentation to Diane, we can use her laptop. Did Roger dial back in yet??"
I completely agree. Out of all the places I've worked at and all of the developers I've talked to, not being able to work AV with TVs for presenting or conference calls is the common, almost 100% of the time an issue.
One place I worked at spent about $25,000 to get an AV system setup complete with conference calling that was supposed to make it "easy". Every single meeting without fail we'd waste 10 minutes trying to figure it out then have to bring someone from IT support who would then spend 10 minutes themselves fiddling with it.
Perhaps if expectations were set before rolling out a new system, that IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working, conference system decision-makers would have priorities better aligned with the rest of the organization. Of course you could plan for a "Phase 2" in which mandatory attendance would cease, but that would be based on performance rather than timing.
That's the point: they shouldn't be. A situation like that would be seen as an intolerable waste in the C-suite (with the exception of their IT support guy). However, if the status quo were for the support to be there every time, that sets up a different conversation in the executive meeting:
CEO: "Why does everything take so long to get done?"
Everyone: "We can only have 15 meetings starting at the same time, and any additional meetings must be delayed 20 minutes, because there are only 15 IT support techs."
CEO: "What?!? Is this something to do with that teleconference project? That was like a year ago!"
CIO: "That's why I've suggested to the stakeholders, most of whom are here in this meeting, that they sign off on moving to Phase 2. That way we'll have more capacity to fix the ongoing issues with desktops and printers..."
Everyone: "Absolutely not! Your techs get there ten minutes ahead of time, and usually they're still struggling to get everything working five minutes after we should have started! The system you bought is crap!"
CIO: "We've always had a great relationship with that vendor, but unfortunately their product has had a few issues..."
CEO: "I know what 'great relationship' means... I don't care if the salesmen for competing products don't have comparable expense accounts, just get something in here that works!"
Its been several months, but I recall it is really tied to Skype for Business (Lync), and having a windows domain. The office that had one of these didn't use skype for business nor had an Windows domain. It can be switched into a dumb display mode though, but performance in that mode is iffy.
What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.
Despite it being Microsoft, I've found it to be the most reliable and seamless system for multi-party Audio, Video, and Screen-sharing based meetings - and I've used at some time or another in my career almost all the other big hitters in the corporate virtual-conferencing space.
Combine Lync/SfB with one of those nice multi-camera units[1] that sit in the middle of the meeting table and provide audio tracking of the speaker (the active camera switches to the person speaking) along with always-on 360 degree video as well - and it's the closest you can get to being there.
Our company has used 3 generations of polycom devices and they have all been terrible/unusable. Those units are just an IT nightmare because of how they are set up. The newer ones require two ethernet ports if you want them wired (because reasons?), and then also act as a weird computer joining the meeting. If you are in a room with a device, the room has to be invited and join the meeting, then you have to make sure that polycom device is set up with sound but that everything else in the room is muted or else the electronic Harpies will be unleashed. Then if you want screen sharing and video, since the video is regulated by the polycom but screen is shared on a laptop, you can potentially get the video in video in video recursive fun time which will result in fun buffering.
We have "quick" instructions on how to use these devices and they take up a whole page. Most of the devices are abandoned or just left there gathering dust while we use a simple Jabra speaker puck.
PS - Most of these experiences are with SfB. These devices are somehow worse with Webex.
> What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.
I've used that, and experienced comparable delays of at least 5 minutes of futzing on average to get everything working, with occasional bursts to 10 minutes.
Anecdotal, but our company uses SfB and it has been anything but good. We always have problems in voice calls (which forms the majority of use) - doesn't matter if we're all sitting on the same LAN with wired connections or on very good Internet connections away from the office. The number of disconnects, breaking audio, unable to hear someone, and of course, SfB deciding to crash sometimes after some updates - it's been terrible for people using it. The company has "saved" money by moving to it from using phone lines. Who cares about individual productivity anyway?
Having been on the other side of a Skype for Business installation I can tell you that it is extremely variable and can scale anywhere from a self-contained single server set-up[1] to a multi-region, multi-fail-over-cluster, highly available, extremely complicated set-up[2]. We had a few issues post initial install but spent the time to track them down to the point where our system was reliable and more usable than web ex and it's ilk. This is the crux of Lync, so much depends on your required set up and how well that was done.
Well, we're on MS Office 365 and all that it provides, including Skype. I have no idea how things could be so bad even with that (it used to be bad before with an on-premise installation too).
Most of my customers are located in a different city than the one I live and work in. You'd think videoconferencing would be perfect for someone like me.
But no, once or twice a month I rent a car and drive ~225km to meet with them personally. I supplement these in-person meetings with phone calls.
I'm not sure I've ever had a videoconference call go perfectly smoothly, and I found that these kinds of calls added all sorts of invisible friction to the customer relationship. My goal as a service provider is to take problems away from my customer, not to add new ones or make them feel technically inept.
My travel days are long and tiring, but most of my customers actually forget that I'm not local, which is exactly how I like it.
This product looks interesting, and purports to solve some of the issues, but color me skeptical.
Do you think a video wall would help? I often wonder if it is the size of the screen that makes people feel 'distant' when using video conferencing.
Super high def full wall screen, so they can see every hair on your head with minimal lag -- I think this would work, the only thing they'd miss was a handshake.
Why do members of an online conference need to be seen at all? What is the benefit of adding video instead of just using audio -- y'know, the medium by which actually information is exchanged?
Human beings happen to be tuned for face to face communication. They exchange a relatively low bandwidth but high importance information through facial gestures, eyebrows, eye contact, etcetera. As long as businesses relationships are still happening between such human beings, there will be a value placed on seeing each other's faces.
Yeah, I get that. I'm sure there are benefits for a purely business-oriented meeting where people are guarding their cards and trying to make deals.
But I've had to be on conferences with purely technical topics where people use cameras. There's barely even a reason for the call to begin with when specs and questions can just be sent via e-mail, so why do we need to see each other?
I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up exponentially. We found that most people want quality in the 95th percentile but want to pay for the 70th percentile... There will need to be some serious cost reductions, integrations, and improvements on the hardware and video encoding side before enterprise video conferencing meets the quality and price expectations that customers want.
Also important, most video conferencing solutions suffer from the same problems because they all use the same hardware just with a different software layer written on top of it. There are very few providers of video encoding and processing hardware.
If you are only looking for UX vidyo has a decent product, Microsoft's latest enterprise offering is good, HPs halo now owned by polycom is good, polycom has some cutting edge stuff that is good but very expensive.
If the UX is so bad that people can't make it work and have to resort to putting someone's laptop at one end of the conference table instead of using the conference room AV, then it doesn't matter how good the other three quarters of your system is.
I simply don't believe this. The cost to develop a system that isn't a horribly complex, unintuitive UX disaster is that much more expensive? We aren't talking about amazing AV quality with lag, we're talking about a system that doesn't take 15 minutes out of a meeting to get working.
There are a lot of reasons for horrible complexity.... 1. There are many ways to roll out a video conferencing system because the hardware is all commodity. Many companies will have their IT department buy all the hardware and try to deploy it using the built in methodologies for connecting conference rooms. This is usually when everyone is given a 16 digit pin number to dial into a room, this causes the dial in nightmares. There are also 3rd parties that will basically sell the same solution as the "custom IT solution" as a service. 2. If you want a decent UI experience you move from snapping commodity hardware together to building a software engineering team, software release pipeline, software updates, and all the stuff that comes along with it. This is usually done by a third party but it still costs more than the commodity solution which it is priced against 3. Once you get a software engineering team involved they have to support the different types of hardware out in production. Most companies have generations of conferencing hardware installed with different configurations throughout the company and do not want to pay for all new hardware. Now your software has to be able to implement screen sharing with 5 different codecs and all those codecs have different bugs and different communication protocols. 4. HP tried to solve this by building their own codecs and forcing all rooms to deploy with the same configurations, but this ended up being the most expensive video conferencing system in the world. It also had the best quality and best reliability.
So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.
I'm not sure where the optimism comes from. I too have been surprised at how mediocre most conferencing software is, and concluded that it's probably harder than it seems.
What would great videoconferencing software look like, and what are the odds that this is it?
realtime protocols depend a lot on where are you and where are the participants, and even if you cover everything else you have random things that you have no influence on. like what route does your traffic go, how is the buffer set up on this route and so on.
i had to debug voip and outside of some simple things like not enough resources/bandwidth it can be really frustrating.
We've tried loads of them. Skype, hangouts, appear.in, zoom, ... They all sucked with voice and video all cutting out and getting regularly garbled etc. And finally Slack added video, and is amazing. No problems since then, Slack has solved the problem for us.
Everyone has tried. If you're in SF and a BART user you will have seen at least three different ones being advertised. I believe the BlueJeans ones are still up.
I don't know Google even today comes across as a company that does technology very well but not solutions. It's a shame that no startup took this on till now.
Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.
Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.
They are and were in the space with their Chromebox product and service. Unfortunately, kid of like how Google does, it seems they just kid of plateaued once they created it. Their whole Google Apps for enterprise suite is stale as can be.
It kind of frustrates me to no end that, e.g., you can't set "smart filters" in gmail that can clean out noise emails (newsletters, notifications, etc.) based on age or quantity. All gmail filters can only be applied to incoming emails.
Have you tried Cisco's offerings? Maybe I just have a really excellent IT department, but whether joining audio only, from a tablet, desk, desk phone or telepresence room it just works. It's impressive as hell.
Best thing about Hangouts: it was rock solid and bulletproof at first, despite the clunky UI (and weird plugin system). Somewhere along the road, they removed all the crap UI, and in the process:
- it became more unreliable (F5 to get sound working)
- it introduced crazy bugs (says your muted, but not really!)
- it remained software accelerated on mac so it kills the batt
Are they competing with WebEx, Skype, or Slack? Looks like a compelling B2B offering from Amazon. I bet they'll have an accompanying hardware to go with this in the coming months.
I am speculating that they are probably using some Electron app. So they could have probably done Linux. I am just guessing that it's a support issue since Linux comes in so many different ways.
Don't overlook that a team might keep using something else because they need to make a conf call between 3 Macs, 1 Windows and 1 Linux (a case with a customer of mine).
Amazon acquired Biba[0], this is that product with the backend swapped out. It's currently being beta'd internally and they haven't yet added anything over Biba the product. There are some great features planned, from what I've heard.
Great product idea. At work we use Skype for business and it's a disaster - especially bad is it seemingly randomly says 'your device is causing poor audio quality' and mutes you. The only way to recover is to dial out and in. Before that it was the AT&T solution - such an ugly application with poor usability. If Amazon really polish this product and provide a great user experience and quality they could pick up a lot of business.
Edit: there's a problem here. Skype for business allows up to 250 participants. The AT&T solution (webex maybe) allows, I think, an unlimited number. Amazon Chime has a limit of 250 people. This wouldn't cut it for presentations in large companies e.g. announcement of annual results or divisional virtual 'town hall'
All conferenincing systems have a limit on the number of first-class participants (people who can listen and speak). Broadcast is a different problem and there are a ton of really good solutions when you have less than 250 speakers but many listeners.
There are no conferencing products, to my knowledge, that support more than 250 first-class participants over the internet in a reliable way.
If you have an example, I'd be very curious to play with that product.
I really do not like conference systems which do not work on Linux. Not everybody is using a Mac or Windows. Microsoft is also ignoring Skype and Skype for Business on Linux. This is all crap.
At my current gig, it's WebEx. The Linux client supposedly does work on 32-bit FireFox using 32-bit Java. I've tried some docker containers that supposedly support this configuration, but so far I can't get anything to work.
WebEx is literally the only reason I even start up a Windows VM at work.
I didn't try it out. The old client still works. The only missing feature is screen sharing in multiple parties video calls. I'm using TeamViewer for that. Desktop sharing is much smoother with TeamViewer anyway.
The real plus of Skype over Hangout or Webex is the chat: the history is stored forever locally and I can search every message I sent. We're using a Skype group chat even when we're using TeamViewer.
It's a problem because it seems that the new client is far from being fully functional.
Another update: The Linux client v4.3 seems to be safe. In a post on page 2 of that thread the community manager states
> At this time we are not retiring any of the existing working Linux Clients.
What they are retiring are old Windows and Mac clients
> beginning March 1, users running older versions of Skype for Windows desktop (7.16 and below) or Skype for Mac (7.0 to 7.18) will no longer be able to sign in.
> That would be a big problem. Any link to that announcement?
No problem. I am using the new Alpha Client since three months and it is very stable and usable. The only major missing feature are video conference calls with more but one opposite, but that is actively being worked on. Looks like MS is heading for feature parity with the Windows client.
We are mostly Mac and Linux at my company.. give Zoom a shot, it's worked out well for video, audio, and sharing... (Europeans in this post have had latency issues though)
I can vouch for this, used it daily for most of last year.. And we didn't have much of any latency issues with our team in Canada and 2 others in Turkey.
We (resin.io) are a totally remote company, with 50 people across 25 cities on 5 continents, and we use Zoom for pretty much everything every day, it's amazing.
I've never seen any latency problems personally - we even do a call with everybody in the company in one room every week, mostly on video, and it doesn't even blink. Drastically better than anything else I've ever tried.
For our needs, https://talky.io does the trick. It "just works" for our Linux machines (along with Mac and Windows). Never tried to use it on mobile (however apparently there's an iPhone app for it). It's peer-to-peer low-latency video chatting via WebRTC, the video quality is far better for us than our previous attempts with Google Hangouts.
Their claim of "a third of the cost of traditional solutions" is an apples and oranges comparison.
The basic and plus pricing options, while cheap, are practically useless with only 2 maximum attendees and the $15/user/month pro plan is hardly "a third of the cost...".
Looks like a great product with an average price point.
Skype for Business is available in all Office 365 Business plans except the software-only one (ProPlus). That includes the $5/6 plan (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-busine...) as well as the $8.25/10 plan that includes all of Office.
Haven't looked but probably no Windows Mobile support either. I know I'm a infinitesimal user base, but the lack of support from services makes me not use them. This is one place Slack really excels and why I hate Hangouts.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadWith a smart phone that would pretty well via a push notification or an actual call, but not sure how that would work when you want a join a meeting from a physical meeting room with its own AV system. I'm sure there is a way to get that set up.
ie, I'm in someone's Chime/webex, and I need to join a different one. Also does it seamlessly join multiple connections - one benefit of Webex is that I can start my meeting on the iPhone while leaving a meeting room so that others can hop on, and then have my laptop join later so I can share my screen when I hit my desk.
My company used WebEx and I could make it dial me and start up my conference line without having to go through all the regular pin entry stuff. Now we're using Lync (Skype for business) which is similar although tragically buggy. That can also dial me and sends notifications if you hook it up.
The key for these kind of apps is cost and reliability. Seems like they're advertising substantial cost reductions and better quality. If either one is true they'll likely make out really well.
WebEx wasn't as convenient but at least it worked correctly the vast majority of the time.
You answered yourself - no, quality is not life and death (at least not fast death) for this product. :)
When there's a rare issue, its usually a headset not working, which is probably more a user or windows problem.
My company has about 4000 users in 100+ countries so maybe it's bandwidth/scale in part. i see a lot of stuff like skypefb crashes or doesn't render correctly when you try to screen share, etc especially internationally.
Not 100% certain part of it isn't due to us cheaping out on infrastructure to run it.
As someone who works in video conferencing, this is often very broken. The are all kinds of compatibility issues and crappy UX. One of our core selling points is getting room systems into online meetings.
WebEx has (sort of) that capability. There is an option for it to call you when you join a meeting.
1. Make it so meeting codes are strictly forbidden from having repeating digits, by construction.
2. Make it so that when entering meeting codes, if you think you see repeated digits, consider it just one instance of that digit.
The cell system does not use literal DMTF tones to dial calls; those are played by the phone itself for the user's benefit. If the cell system used DMTF for numeric signalling, we'd all be dialing a lot more wrong numbers. (And we'd all groan when we got a new line with a number with repeated digits in it....) Heck, even on VOIP systems very well connected to the internet, I've had trouble entering 9-12 digit codes without the remote system becoming convinced I'd actually entered a 11-15 digit code. I've gotten a few strange looks before for the way I push the buttons for the codes as rapidly as possible, because, ironically, the human intuition here is exactly backwards; you intuitively think that if the remote system isn't understanding your numbers you should press the number "longer" and harder, but that actually increases the chances of the system hearing multiple instances of that number. You actually want to pound the number buttons as quickly as possible. You still can't deal with the entire number being dropped, but it's still your best chance sometimes.
....
'course, there's probably some patent out that this is in violation of. In which case you are authorized and even encouraged to use this post as part of a defense that this technique is Obvious to One Skilled in the Art. I'm not a telecom engineer.
Chime is the absolute good step in the right direction, however we will need need a layer on top to solve for all conference call systems.
There are three pieces that needs to be figured out to make this work well:
1. How do you deal with (non?) presence? Are you joining from the AV hardware? 2. How do you deal with PSTN? 3. How do you deal with other VoIP solutions out there.
I have a few ideas on this, especially on #2.
As you suggest for a physical meeting or when people have back to back meetings, it would quickly get annoying.
I wonder if this also reflects that calendar apps still suck.
Hrm, SIP URIs maybe? https://www.wikiwand.com/en/SIP_URI_scheme
Furthermore, the security is apparently "fully managed", which to me translates to "keys securely stored on our servers, not client-side."
I'm not sure I see the utility in this, as Amazon resources and group chat don't really have a lot of overlap, at least for me. What would you need "integrated" into the new AWS Chat that couldn't be accomplished with a chatbot and Slack?
This wording has always struck me as being awful. People felt confident investing with Bernie Madoff as well. I'd rather have confidence from proven security instead of just feeling confident.
Minimally it is centralized, and you can't verify that there's no backdoor. In this day and age, that means we're both trusting their core intentions, and also trusting that some government won't step in and silently force their hand. I don't personally feel that is good enough to be considered secure anymore.
s/, if it's in the US//
There, fixed it for you. Any data not under your control can and will be used against you, especially by a state wielding a monopoly on force.
Had that team remained relevant they could have conceivably done a "Chromebox" Hub like the Surface Hub and given Microsoft some competition in that space.
EDIT: Ok so as is pointed out there is a chromebox for meetings. Pretty nice. Seems to be out of the Enterprise group though, is that still part of Google or is it an 'Other Bet' now?
The only problem I used to have is audio would die whenever I mess with browser plugins (disabling that WebRTC feature that leaks your internal IP for privacy, and some other Googlyeish feature).
Also we keep WebEx around for screen control, it seems still best bang/buck for that.
Also, modern GVC is fucking amazing.
Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone can do) because Google Home is there, so that Google Home can tell you that Google Home can't add calendar entries yet.
Hey, here's Allo. We think you're going to love it. I mean, it doesn't have SMS support, so no one is actually going to use it, but other than being pointless, ain't it great?
My EVP there would have walked in, saw the first slide about a new messenger, and said, "Let me stop you here. Does it transparently bridge IP chat and SMS into one conversation like iMessage? No? OK, I'm going to lunch. I'm sure your stickers are cool and all, but pass."
Hangouts has been amazing for us.
Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video.
I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do.
And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.
If you're a part of a large Google Cloud account, have your IT person contact your gCloud account manager and get on the beta. Actually, if you're a part of a large account and your IT team is risk tolerant.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, albeit not on Chrome, and use this every day.
The coolest thing is that the company rolled out hangouts in a weekend to 100% of the conference rooms, replacing all projectors in the process. It completely democratized remote work and remote offices since people are using Hangout by default.
1.) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communica...
We're across 24 hours of time zones and conduct a majority of internal and external meetings over video conference. We've pretty much tried them all and Zoom has been the best.
That said, there are still things to improve, so will be interesting to compare.
With Google Hangouts we have poor quality audio as well and at least once per day we have someone that their audio won't come thorough unless they restart their Mac.
Except in rare cases, I find the problems you're describing are usually a problem with the end-user, their equipment, or their network. Cheap phones, bad cell connection, bad voip, etc. An unmuted speakerphone with a noisy background can bring most calls to their knees.
I bought a SABRA bluetooth thingie for the room. Seems to work well.
Our results are mixed. We test out the conf room before the meeting starts. Good to go. Then weird stuff happens. People being muted. Their icon shows them talking, but no sound. People being dropped.
I don't mind the unreliability so much. 7 laws of networking and so forth.
I frikkin hate that I don't know what's broken, so can't hope to fix it. Especially DURING the frikkin meeting.
I'm wondering what your CPU usage looks like in Zoom sessions when just participating vs. when you're sharing your screen.
Which platform and hardware are you on?
- Zoom (larger meetings where we need it to be rock solid),
- Hangouts (for smaller / quick meetings since we are in Gsuite), and
- WebEx (for external tech support / keyboard sharing)
- Slack / Screenhero (internal chat and keyboard sharing)
Zoom has been a revelation especially with large videoconferences. Rock solid global performance.
At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr.
But uhh, call-in rates of 1c/min/participant? That's going to add up. We would regularly have meetings of two hour duration (programming, planning) with up to six-eight attending is a $10 meeting in itself. Chicken feed compared to salaries but I could easily see pricing of up to $1k/mo with this.
Shame.
To get a $1k meeting bill with $100k fully loaded avg participant cost or about $50/hr (way too low in metros, but let's be conservative), that's 1600+ meeting hours or about $80k/mo in staff costs.
(I see you do mention this but I wanted to call it out).
I think an interesting way to look at it is, if it can make your meetings one minute shorter than what you do now, you'll actually save.
Am curious how? I think it's like max $50 a person/month, and that's only for huge meetings.
I'm really not surprised they built their own in the end. It's a clear pain point for companies.
That said, my current employers (not Amazon) have been using Zoom (zoom.us) and it seems to be really quite good. I've had almost no problems with it at all.
"Anyone there? Hello? Crap, someone needs to dial in as the host. OK Is everyone dialed in? Good. Oh, wait, Roger can't hear us. Roger, dial back in. OK. Hey, whoever is at the cocktail party, can you go on mute?? Thank you. All right. Who's projecting? The projector is VGA, does anyone have a laptop with VGA? How about a dongle? Great, we can see it now. Can everyone who's remote see the screen sharing? No? OK let's restart the screen sharing program. How about now? Shit, we lost Roger again! Why is the screen 640x480? Damnit, can we just use a different laptop? E-mail the presentation to Diane, we can use her laptop. Did Roger dial back in yet??"
It's almost universally an awful UX.
One place I worked at spent about $25,000 to get an AV system setup complete with conference calling that was supposed to make it "easy". Every single meeting without fail we'd waste 10 minutes trying to figure it out then have to bring someone from IT support who would then spend 10 minutes themselves fiddling with it.
Why must these things be so complicated that you need IT support for them? The purpose of computers is to automate and make things easier.
CEO: "Why does everything take so long to get done?"
Everyone: "We can only have 15 meetings starting at the same time, and any additional meetings must be delayed 20 minutes, because there are only 15 IT support techs."
CEO: "What?!? Is this something to do with that teleconference project? That was like a year ago!"
CIO: "That's why I've suggested to the stakeholders, most of whom are here in this meeting, that they sign off on moving to Phase 2. That way we'll have more capacity to fix the ongoing issues with desktops and printers..."
Everyone: "Absolutely not! Your techs get there ten minutes ahead of time, and usually they're still struggling to get everything working five minutes after we should have started! The system you bought is crap!"
CIO: "We've always had a great relationship with that vendor, but unfortunately their product has had a few issues..."
CEO: "I know what 'great relationship' means... I don't care if the salesmen for competing products don't have comparable expense accounts, just get something in here that works!"
Despite it being Microsoft, I've found it to be the most reliable and seamless system for multi-party Audio, Video, and Screen-sharing based meetings - and I've used at some time or another in my career almost all the other big hitters in the corporate virtual-conferencing space.
Combine Lync/SfB with one of those nice multi-camera units[1] that sit in the middle of the meeting table and provide audio tracking of the speaker (the active camera switches to the person speaking) along with always-on 360 degree video as well - and it's the closest you can get to being there.
---
[1] http://www.polycom.co.uk/products-services/products-for-micr...
Sorry, Lync/Skype for Business has been awful for us.
I'll be fair and state that I don't if it is Microsoft's or our tech teams fault.
We have "quick" instructions on how to use these devices and they take up a whole page. Most of the devices are abandoned or just left there gathering dust while we use a simple Jabra speaker puck.
PS - Most of these experiences are with SfB. These devices are somehow worse with Webex.
I've used that, and experienced comparable delays of at least 5 minutes of futzing on average to get everything working, with occasional bursts to 10 minutes.
[1] - http://bressner.com/ucbox-express/ [2] - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=550989
But no, once or twice a month I rent a car and drive ~225km to meet with them personally. I supplement these in-person meetings with phone calls.
I'm not sure I've ever had a videoconference call go perfectly smoothly, and I found that these kinds of calls added all sorts of invisible friction to the customer relationship. My goal as a service provider is to take problems away from my customer, not to add new ones or make them feel technically inept.
My travel days are long and tiring, but most of my customers actually forget that I'm not local, which is exactly how I like it.
This product looks interesting, and purports to solve some of the issues, but color me skeptical.
Super high def full wall screen, so they can see every hair on your head with minimal lag -- I think this would work, the only thing they'd miss was a handshake.
Oops, you're frozen. Dang, we lost the connection. There's a really bad echo, do you hear that? Bob can't connect. Etc.
Besides, I'm not particularly handsome in HD. :-)
But I've had to be on conferences with purely technical topics where people use cameras. There's barely even a reason for the call to begin with when specs and questions can just be sent via e-mail, so why do we need to see each other?
Also important, most video conferencing solutions suffer from the same problems because they all use the same hardware just with a different software layer written on top of it. There are very few providers of video encoding and processing hardware.
So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.
I've done a lot of deals, real high value business, and meeting coordination in them, in a variety of situations and companies.
What would great videoconferencing software look like, and what are the odds that this is it?
i had to debug voip and outside of some simple things like not enough resources/bandwidth it can be really frustrating.
I guess video conferencing is about to get really easy to implement over WebRTC.
So I'm guessing there will be an explosion of competitors soon.
BlueJeans is pretty good.
Have you tried http://www.justchimein.com/chime-in.html ?
It kind of frustrates me to no end that, e.g., you can't set "smart filters" in gmail that can clean out noise emails (newsletters, notifications, etc.) based on age or quantity. All gmail filters can only be applied to incoming emails.
Have you tried Cisco's offerings? Maybe I just have a really excellent IT department, but whether joining audio only, from a tablet, desk, desk phone or telepresence room it just works. It's impressive as hell.
https://www.ciscospark.com/products/overview.html
D: I work at Cisco and use Spark daily.
Why not Linux?
[0] http://www.biba.com/
Edit: there's a problem here. Skype for business allows up to 250 participants. The AT&T solution (webex maybe) allows, I think, an unlimited number. Amazon Chime has a limit of 250 people. This wouldn't cut it for presentations in large companies e.g. announcement of annual results or divisional virtual 'town hall'
There are no conferencing products, to my knowledge, that support more than 250 first-class participants over the internet in a reliable way.
If you have an example, I'd be very curious to play with that product.
https://answers.chime.aws/articles/17/supported-operating-sy...
WebEx is literally the only reason I even start up a Windows VM at work.
https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/bd-p/Linux
I didn't try it out. The old client still works. The only missing feature is screen sharing in multiple parties video calls. I'm using TeamViewer for that. Desktop sharing is much smoother with TeamViewer anyway.
The real plus of Skype over Hangout or Webex is the chat: the history is stored forever locally and I can search every message I sent. We're using a Skype group chat even when we're using TeamViewer.
Edit: never mind, I googled it https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-for-Linux-End-of-...
(I should have googled first, asked second)
It's a problem because it seems that the new client is far from being fully functional.
Another update: The Linux client v4.3 seems to be safe. In a post on page 2 of that thread the community manager states
> At this time we are not retiring any of the existing working Linux Clients.
What they are retiring are old Windows and Mac clients
> beginning March 1, users running older versions of Skype for Windows desktop (7.16 and below) or Skype for Mac (7.0 to 7.18) will no longer be able to sign in.
Phew!
No problem. I am using the new Alpha Client since three months and it is very stable and usable. The only major missing feature are video conference calls with more but one opposite, but that is actively being worked on. Looks like MS is heading for feature parity with the Windows client.
and the linux client works really well (it's on aur, if you use archlinux)
I've never seen any latency problems personally - we even do a call with everybody in the company in one room every week, mostly on video, and it doesn't even blink. Drastically better than anything else I've ever tried.
Also, it's free.
The basic and plus pricing options, while cheap, are practically useless with only 2 maximum attendees and the $15/user/month pro plan is hardly "a third of the cost...".
Looks like a great product with an average price point.
Skype for Business is available in all Office 365 Business plans except the software-only one (ProPlus). That includes the $5/6 plan (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-busine...) as well as the $8.25/10 plan that includes all of Office.
It's not a very good competitor on that front...
That's a personal concern I have with slack.
> No Linux support